27 February 2015

Bunkum

The
fact that there’s any kind of etymological connection between politics and
long-winded speeches (or, for that matter, between politics and a word meaning
“complete nonsense”) might come as little surprise. But the fact is thatbunkumowes its existence to a tediously
lengthy political speech delivered byUS Congressman Felix Walkerin 1820.

Born
in Virginia in 1753, Walker was elected to Congress in 1817 as representative
for Buncombe County, North Carolina. He spent a total of six years in the
House, during which time Congress was tasked with debating the so-called
Missouri Question—namely, whether the territory of Missouri should be admitted
into the Union as a free or a slave state—in late 1819.

The
debate rumbled on for several inconclusive months, until finally, just before
the decisive vote was due to be taken, Congressman Walker stood to address the
house on 25 February 1820.

He went on to deliver a lengthy, rambling, and largely irrelevant 5,000-word
speech—which, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can now torture
yourself withhere; to put that into perspective,
Walker’s speech is around 1,000 words longer than the entire role of
Hamlet.

Felix Walker, inventor of the cure for insomnia

Walker’s speech went on and on and on. And on. And on.
His exasperated colleagues repeatedly shouted him down and yelled at him to
desist, but, undeterred, he continued talking and proudly explained that he was
not, “speaking to the House, but to Buncombe.”

Out of everything that he said that day, it was this pithy
explanation that proved to be the most significant. Soon, saying or doing
something “for Buncombe” slipped into American slang to mean “doing something
purely to please other people”, and the mid-1800s, it was being so widely used
that its original spelling Buncombe was lost, and it was the
newly-simplified bunkum that ultimately became a byword for
political claptrap, empty promises, and eventually utter nonsense.

The clipped form bunk followed in the early
1900s, and we’ve been debunking things since 1923.

Felix Walker, meanwhile, is now commemorated on a plaque in his home county of
Buncombe for, quite rightly, giving a “new meaning to the word.”